Wednesday, August 16, 2017

T-Mobile U.S. has begun lighting up its new 600 MHz LTE network — making it the first operator worldwide to activate commercial LTE services on this band. T-Mobile’s first 600 MHz LTE network sites were just switched on in Cheyenne, Wyoming using Nokia equipment.

The announcement comes only two months after T-Mobile received its spectrum licenses from the FCC.

T-Mobile said it is activating 600 MHz sites in rural locations first, where the spectrum is clear of broadcasting today, and will follow rapidly in other locations. The 600 MHz band propagates twice as far and is four times better in buildings than mid-band.

This year, additional 600 MHz sites are slated for locations including Wyoming, Northwest Oregon, West Texas, Southwest Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, Western North Dakota, Maine, Coastal North Carolina, Central Pennsylvania, Central Virginia and Eastern Washington. These deployments will broaden T-Mobile's LTE coverage from 315 million Americans today to 321 million by year’s end.

“Earlier this month, wireless customers coast to coast proved T-Mobile already delivers America’s best unlimited network. We swept the competition in OpenSignal’s report on all counts—a global industry first. And that was before we started lighting up the world’s first 600 MHz LTE network,” said John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile. “Buckle up, carriers. Because the Un-carrier’s 600 MHz network just got real.”

T-Mobile also noted that it has been coordinating closely with the infrastructure providers, chipset makers and device manufacturers to bring 600 MHz LTE to market. Nokia and Qualcomm have launched new technology, and both Samsung and LG plan to launch phones that tap into this new spectrum in the fourth quarter of this year.

“To work with T-Mobile in lighting up the world’s first 600 MHz LTE network is a momentous achievement,” said Rajeev Suri, President and Chief Executive Officer of Nokia. “We knew this spectrum would be key for covering wide areas, providing bandwidth in hard-to-reach places, augmenting capacity and improving data speeds, so we began testing and readying 600 MHz network infrastructure equipment and software long before the incentive auction was over.”

In the FCC's broadcast incentive auction earlier this year, T-Mobile US acquired 45% of all low-band spectrum auctioned, covering all of the U.S. and Puerto Rico. T-Mobile acquired 31 MHz of spectrum nationwide on average, quadrupling its low-band holdings, for a total of $7.99 billion. With the purchase, T-Mobile claims to hold more low-band spectrum per customer than any other major provider, and nearly 3x the low-band spectrum per customer held by Verizon.